It's a Welsh Grand Slam for 2 goal Harding

Bison 3 Milton Keynes Thunder 0

16/3/19

The Milton Keynes Thunder visited Planet Ice for the final time this season, having been on the end of two trousers down spankings by 5-0 and 7-2 previously. Would they fare better on this occasion? Yes they would, thanks to a Colossus of Rhodes performance from their Basingstoke born netman, Jordan Lawday, who proved as impregnable as the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain, the Great Wall of China, the Maginot Line, Hadrian’s wall and the vault doors at Fort Knox all rolled into one. Well almost. He stopped 45 of 48 attempts by Bison to breach his pipes including shut outs P1 and P3, but, alas for the visitors, not a P2 one. At the other end Dan “The Beast” Weller-Evans in the Bison net completed a rather quiet shut out night with only 14 saves to make. He would even have had time to take out a newspaper and read it, as he went for long periods without having to do anything, but hey a shutout is a shutout. Well done Dan.

As I have already mentioned P1 was scoreless, so I shall waste no ink in describing the proceedings and move straight on to the 2^nd epoch. Bison has been frustrated in the 1^st and their frustration continued in the 2^nd. 9 more minutes passed and still they had failed to find a way past the Thunder custodian. How were they going beat Lawday? Long range shots? Walking the puck around him? Smoke and mirrors? The latter seemed to be the only thing they hadn’t tried. As it turned out, ineptitude in defence proved to be the Thunder’s undoing as I shall relate in the following paragraph of this humble narrative, dear reader, so pray read on.

As the mid point of the game approached Thunder finally cracked like a quail’s egg hit with a pile driver. Coach Ashley Tait scrapped for the puck on the boards in a never capitulate, never say die, never give up, never surrender and never wave the white flag manner and came away with the biscuit. He slewed a cross ice pass to Alex Sampford in the slot. Lawday was well forward of his goal covering the middle and left hand side of the net. On December 16th 1985 Big Paul Castellano, head of the Gambino crime family, was gunned down outside Sparks Steak House in Lower Manhattan. Hit men lay in wait and the dietarily challenged crime boss (that’s the corpulent mobster below) was rubbed out in a hail of lead as he exited his car. Castellano had no bodyguard and the hit was a piece of cake. The moral of the story is be prepared. And that is exactly what the Thunder D weren’t on 29:58. Sampford fired to the all alone, unchallenged, unmolested, unseen Welshman Adam Harding at the back door. The goal gaped as wide as the Grand Canyon as he drove the puck into the net. Cymru am byth. 1-0 Bison.

Ok so only a goal down. Could Thunder carrying on where they’d left off on 29:57? They fared well for another 7 minutes, but their night was about to go from thunderous to chunderous in the space of 15 seconds starting on 37:16. Jay King danced forward and supplied a pass to Sampford, who in turn found Harding. There were a few players in the way, but Harding decided to have a shot. He snapped his wrists and the puck flew towards the Thunder net. Martin Luther King very famously had a dream. Lawday also had a dream. It was dream that he could keep Harding’s shot out. Such proved to be nothing more than a pipe dream as the puck flew past the hapless netman and into the net. 2 goals for Harding and 2-0 Bison.

Back in 1967 Otis Redding sat on the dock of the bay watchin’ the tide roll away and wastin’ time. In respect of the latter there was no similarity between Otis and Bison. They wasted no time in forcing re-employment on the thumb of the goal judge behind the Thunder net as they bagged a 3^rd 15 seconds of playing time later. Oscar Evans found himself in the slot with the puck at his feet, but being held from behind by a Thunder D-man in what appeared to be a loving embrace. Evans wiggled, wriggled and jiggled, but couldn’t free himself from the attention of his admirer and with his arms pinned to his sides the puck remained elusively in front of him. Suddenly Michal Klejna was on the scene. He may have said to Evans, “if you’re not going to do anything with it, I’d better”, but I heard no such utterance in far way Block C. The Slovak chap swept majestically past like a gazelle sprinting across the savanna, taking the puck with him. In 1953 Doris Day portrayed the legendary frontierswoman Calamity Jane in a musical of the same name (that’s her in the rôle bottom right). Many a young man lost his heart to the buckskin clad, six gun toting, sweet singing Day. The real Calamity Jane (Martha Jane Canary) shown below left, was, shall we say, less aesthetically pleasing. Had the Miss World contest been in existence at the time, she would not have been an entrant. She was by all accounts a tobacco chewing, beer swilling, foul mouthed woman who preferred to dress in men’s clothing. In terms of aesthetics the Klejna movement had the qualities of Doris Day, but the alas the Thunder defending was more Martha Jane Canary and Klejna remained free and unchallenged as he whipped a wrist shot past a cruelly exposed Lawday. Coach Tait was elected secondary confederate to the scorer. 3-0 Bison.

And so we moved into the final epoch of the regular season at the Basingstoke Arena. Prepare yourselves for a long question. Would it be a period of eye catching purple specalularity, which would thrill, dazzle and astound all present, resulting in jaws dropping open, tongues lolling out, eyes bulging and salivating and would there be utterances of “Blistering biriyanis”, “Good golly Miss Molly”, “Holy cow” and “By ‘eck, by gum and by all that is sacred” from the crowd as they revelled in Ooo matron hockey of the finest quality from the homesters? Well actually no. That’s not what happened. A rather flat final 20 minutes were played out without further scoring and Lawday’s save percentage for the game rose to a towering 93.75 as he stopped another 17 shots on his goal. At the other end a newspaperless Dan “The Beast” Weller-Evans, Bison’s other Welshman, had his shut out with 14 saves. Cymru am byth.

And so all that remained was for the the Top Bananas to be elected. Unsurprisingly Lawday was the Thunder star with 45 saves from 48 shots. Bavy gave a stirring speech far greater than Curchill’s “We'll fight them on the beaches” ditty and duly declared that the entire Bison team were the Top Bananas. No-one disagreed. What a season where a bunch of 3^rd liners no-one wanted, an untried coach, a captain dragged out of retirement and a pair of unknown imports thrown together at just a few weeks’ notice had performed such miracles. They had beaten every other team in the league home and away. Now for the play offs. Stay tuned.